Thanks to the committee Chairman for bring today's debate. A lot of issues have been raised. Bethan has a lot more knowledge than me on the actual opencast practices.

I'd like to address something that Lynne Neagle raised, which was the issue of why it has taken so long to get from a petition in 2013 to actually debating it here in the Chamber. I don't have all the answers. I was a member of the Petitions Committee for the first year of this term and I think that a problem we found on the Petitions Committee, which the Chairman, who was Mike Hedges at the time, attempted to address pretty swiftly, was that we inherited an awful lot of petitions. There are a lot of petitions, and some of them are pursued more seriously than others, and it appeared to us that the problem was that too many of them hadn't been closed down when they were beyond the stage where we could actually meaningfully do anything with them. So, we had so many different petitions that we couldn't see the wood for the trees, and I think that Mike tried to move more swiftly through the petitions, closed down the ones that we couldn't do anything with, and then we could look at the ones where we could actually do something with them. I think you're right that the process needs to be much swifter if the Petitions Committee is to work meaningfully. I think that it does work better now. Obviously, I'm not on it anymore, but I'm sure that it's working in a more streamlined way than it was before. So, hopefully that will address the problem, with petitions actually getting here a lot quicker, because as you say, it's ridiculous that it's taken so long for this issue to be debated.

Onto to the actual opencast issues, yes, clearly there are lots of problems. Bethan, Dawn Bowden and others have raised them. Opencast mining in many ways is worse than underground mining, because it's taking place above ground, so that the dirt and dust spreads into the local atmosphere, and it's also less labour intensive than underground mining, so fewer people are actually reaping any commercial benefits from it. Certainly we have a whole series of Valleys communities in Wales that were built on underground coal mining, but we don't have any communities in Wales that have been built on opencast mining. What we have had over the past 25 years is a lot of communities complaining about opencast mining, protesting about opencast mining and campaigning against opencast mining. Sometimes, those communities haven't had their voices properly heard, and they have been let down by the planning process, both in terms of the actual plans that have been allowed and also issues that have been raised today over restoration of the sites after they've finished working them.

Now, going on to these actual petitions, the two petitions we're looking at, the first one was instigated by Dr Cox, who wants to make the MTAN mandatory in law—so, when planning decisions are being made, it can't just be guidance; it needs to be mandatory. One of the points he's raising is that opencast applications are not supposed to be allowed unless the mine is at least 500m away from the nearest houses. Clearly, in the case of Varteg Hill, that was not the case, and the guideline was not applied. Now, Dr Cox claims that the adjudicating planning inspector at that hearing said that he wasn't minded to go along with MTAN 2 as it was only guidance. We do appear to have a problem with this. If the planning inspectors are not going along with Government guidance, who are they accountable to? Are they giving enough regard to local concerns? In UKIP we have argued throughout this fifth Assembly that the planning system is not very democratic. It is a technocracy in which planning inspectors who are simply unelected bureaucrats are able to ride roughshod over democratic decisions taken by elected councillors. Then we have the councillors being frightened of ruling against controversial planning applications on the advice of their own planning officers, who tell them that the application will surely win on appeal to the planning inspectorate.

We must bring these planning inspectors under some kind of democratic control. We have to try to democratise the planning process and in UKIP we say that the way to do that is to introduce a provision for legally binding local referenda where planning applications are of major local importance and cause a major local anxiety. We continue to make that call. So far we are the only party in Wales calling for that measure. Until we get democratisation of the planning system, we do agree that MTAN 2 should be made mandatory, as Dr Cox suggests, and as his petitioners agree. We also agree with the second petition that all opencast mining applications of a certain size and of a certain age should all be automatically called in by the Welsh planning Minister. The planning system is all wrong and needs to be urgently reformed. We are the only party saying that, but in the meantime we do happily support today's motion. Diolch yn fawr iawn.